Halfway through the year, policing has killed 12 young men under 23. Capital punishment, its humanity or deterrence become academic when police kill as many civilians as they solve murders.Wrapping himself more tightly in the blindfold and straitjacket of his war on crime, the National Security Minister responded to this week's police killings of three more young men: "I stand firmly behind them that, as it pertains to criminal elements, they need to do it to them, before they do it to us."
If citizens felt the police were out there putting their lives on the line for us while they killed our children, the minister's words might hurt less. For even law-abiding, middle-class people, our experience of policing is not one of protection and confidence, but unresponsiveness and abuse.
Ensuring a professional police force earns a dignified wage and has incentive to solve crime is pure self-interest–yet pious counterarguments erupted when such recommendations came from the Downtown Owners & Merchants Association or a former police commissioner of the two largest US cities.
I spent last weekend with a group of young people who feel their lives are under siege for distinct, yet similar reasons to young men like Hakeem and Tevin Alexander and Chakiulle McCoy.
Youth from Barbados, St Lucia and Jamaica joined their counterparts from the Silver Lining Foundation in Port-of-Spain to catalogue the ways in which sodomy laws criminalise young lesbian, gay and transgender people, and how families, schools, churches and government policy drive them toward self-hate, self-harm, homelessness and underachievement.
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